You’re doing something very specific here, mhaze, and it’s worth naming.

When you make a claim, a short assertion apparently suffices. When that claim is challenged, the bar for disagreement suddenly jumps to “read the entire work”, preferably in the original language, with added biographical context for good measure. That isn’t engagement with the objection, it’s a way of declaring disagreement illegitimate.

Context matters. No one disputes that. But “the context is the whole book” isn’t an argument unless you can say what in that context actually overturns the point being made.

You keep asserting that my reading of the Melian Dialogue isn’t justified “in context”, while refusing to identify where that context does the work you claim it does. No passage, no claim, no explanation, just credentials and a reading list.
That’s not analysis. It’s gatekeeping.

If you think Thucydides endorses the position that “power is all that matters” and that this exhausts the analysis, then say where he does that and how. If the only response is “read it properly”, then there’s nothing substantive left to discuss.

An interpretation that can’t be stated without requiring others to reread several books isn’t an argument. It’s an appeal to authority fallacy.

Greenland. The U.S already has a military base there; and if the U.S decided to take control: “There is no mechanism legal, military or political capable of preventing such a move once Trump decides it’s strategically necessary”. (James Tidmarsh, ‘Trump's Greenland grab would expose Europe's ultimate weakness’).

Europe has turned over most of its security to America. NATO would bark a bit initially, but it can't “discipline its most powerful member”. So any protest would fizzle out.

And, according to Tidmarsh, Article 5 (which says that NATO considers an attack on one of its members as an attack on all of them) refers to outsiders, not “the state that underwrites the system”.

The U.S would not be conquering Greenland, but acting out of necessity to protect America, because Greenland has been neglected by Europe, and exposed it to Russian and Chinese encroachment.

That there is no such thing as enforceable “international law” throws cold water on the plea that Greenland “enjoys recognised status within the Kingdom of Denmark, and its people possess the right to self-determination”. Any fussing by the UN would be vetoed by America.

So, the U.S could take over Greenland if it so chose. There would be a lot of noise. Nothing more.

As far as left wing, pimple-on-a-pumkin Australia goes, we need to lay off criticising America. There are two great powers: America and Communist China.

Take your pick.

Hi mhaze,
"the captured Russian vessels weren't, apparently, carrying Venezuelan oil. It seems they never actually got to Venezuela. But they had come from Iran and were presumably carrying something meant for Caracas. Currently speculation is left over Iranian nuclear fuel following the US-Israeli obliteration of the Iranian attempts to get the bomb"

I saw on one of those videos that the Bella 1 had previously been in Iran went thru the Suez empty and had not made port in Venezuela and no cargo been transferred.
The U.S. seemed to take a lot of interest in it, I did wonder for a moment here whether it may have had some Iranian weapons bound for Venezuela, or something then I got distracted..

I was also looking at this Putin attack a week or so back.
There's some speculation that the Russians deliberately gave Trump Putins (fake / spoofed) location and Putin told him he'd wait at that (fake/spoofed) location, to see if Trump could be trusted.
And then in came 91 drones.
Russia got chips out of the drones and had all the targeting data that only the U.S. could've fascilitated.
Russia gave the chip back and said 'We know everything'

I wonder if the U.S. really did try to assassinate Putin via Ukraine.
Would they actually be that reckless?

Did Putin trick Trump with false location for drone strikes?
http://youtu.be/MTClM5sRywM

Hi John Daysh,

Thanks for that information.
I'd read that Marinera had been boarded due to 'violation of U.S. sanctions' on the high seas, and I thought you'd be the right person to ask.

http://www.rt.com/russia/630704-us-military-maritime-law/
The Russian Transport Ministry has confirmed that the oil tanker ‘Marinera’ has been captured by the US military.

Earlier on Wednesday, the US European Command announced having taken possession of the ship, previously named the ‘Bella 1’, for alleged “violation of US sanctions.”

The tanker was boarded by US military personnel “in the high seas outside the territorial waters of any state,” and that “contact with the vessel was lost,” the Russian Transport Ministry has said.

"I recommend you read Thucydides - all of it!"
Is it just 'History of the Peloponnesian War', or is there more?
Where should I start, I'll see if there's a version I can listen to.

"Did Putin trick Trump with false location for drone strikes?"

Or did you fall for yet another fantasy?

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"then say where he does that and how"

I'm sorry JD. There are no shortcuts here. To know what he was saying and how your claim that " he was documenting imperial arrogance on the road to ruin" was completely off the mark, you need to get into his mind by reading his works. Reading a sentence and interpreting it the way you'd like it to be is wrong. If there was an overriding theme to his works, and I'd dispute that there is one, its not about the failure of the use of power but the way democracy wasn't up to that task.

His work is one of the greatest books in history and really the first history book in history (sorry Herodotus) and reducing it down to a false interpretation of one sentence is rather sad.

AC,

I was joking about reading all of Thucydides, sorry. That was just me poking fun at mhaze. You can ignore it.
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mhaze,

Then we're no longer in disagreement about Thucydides so much as about how arguments work.

You've now said there may be no overriding theme to the work, and that it's as much about the limits of democracy as anything else. That alone is a long way from the claim that Thucydides straightforwardly endorses "power is all that matters".

I'm not reducing the book to a sentence. I'm making a modest claim about the Melian Dialogue's role within the narrative: that it presents a stark articulation of power politics, and that what follows Athens is catastrophic. Calling that a description of imperial arrogance on the road to ruin isn't a slogan, it's a defensible reading shared by many historians.

If your position is now that Thucydides offers no moral endorsement at all, and no simple lesson, then we're much closer than you think. What I've objected to from the start is collapsing his work into a one-line realpolitik mantra and treating that as exhaustive analysis.

At this point, you're not disputing my argument so much as insisting that it can't be discussed without rereading the entire corpus. That may be a view about pedagogy, but it isn't a rebuttal.